


what i know now

by plutoandpersephone



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Android Hank Anderson, First Kiss, Human Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Living Together, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Rating May Change, Trans Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Trans Male Character, Witness Protection, reverse au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 15:31:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20566673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutoandpersephone/pseuds/plutoandpersephone
Summary: Lieutenant Connor Stern is being sent into witness protection. His partner, the HK800 android, is joining him.





	what i know now

The crime report states that the incident happened at 10:23pm on the fourteenth day of May, 2039, in an apartment block approximately three hundred and fifty meters from the banks of the Detroit river. It’s reported initially as a domestic disturbance, and is attended to by the Detroit Police Department.

As far as Lieutenant Connor Stern is concerned, the event could have happened at any time, in any city. All he really remembers a set of dark eyes, their gaze rough with anger, and a spinning red LED lighting up the shabby walls of the room in that downtown apartment. 

Perhaps they call out to him at his intrusion, perhaps not. The first sound he knows is the scream of a gunshot, ricocheting off the doorframe beside his ear. And his own gun, pulled too late, the crack of a bullet on metal. 

The smashing of glass. Footsteps in the alleyway outside, the adrenaline causing his heart to beat a wild drumbeat in his own ears. Frustration, bubbling in his throat, drawn from some bitter, acidic well in his stomach. Failure, the receding shadow of the suspect, a hundred steps taken backwards in their investigation. Connor has always been loathe to do anything apart from grind forwards, onwards, no matter how thin he stretches himself in the process.

He remembers a single shout, his own, ripped roughly from his throat. 

The message comes five days later, delivered to Captain North’s email from an encrypted address. There’s a flurry of activity as soon as it drops, fear spreading throughout the precinct. Connor thinks that most people are more worried about it than he is.

**LIEUTENANT CONNOR STERN IS A DEAD MAN.**

“We’re taking you off the case,” North tells him. Her expression is firm. “Lieutenant Manfred in fifth will be assigned.”

“Manfred?!” 

“Lieutenant Manfred and his team will continue with the case following the events of the fourteenth of May.” If only tantrums paid off in police precincts, Connor would have thrown himself on the floor long ago. He contents himself with balling his hands into fists in his pockets.

“What am I meant to do in the meantime?” Connor snaps, each word a firecracker in the air between them. “Wait for that fucker to find me? Sit on my ass until he climbs into my window at night and shoots me in the head?”

“Of course not.” North’s face is absolutely unreadable. “You’re going into witness protection.” 

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, his hand stretched out before him. “I’ve absolutely misheard you. I thought I heard you say that you’re sending me into witness protection.”

North shoots him a look that is just short of rolling her eyes at him. “That is what I said.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Connor spits the expletive under his breath, and North doesn’t say anything.

“Wait - what about Hank?” Connor adds. “He was there too.” The hulking form of HK800 had shadowed the doorway only seconds after the suspect had escaped, running scans on the relative effectiveness of heading in pursuit and stopping Connor from jumping out of the jagged glass hole after them. “Don’t tell me you’re keeping him on because he’s made of some fucking titanium alloy or something - him and Manfred’ll get this case solved and I’ll be rotting in Bumfuck, Alaska or wherever with-”

North raises her hand. Connor knows that gesture, and it’s a dangerous one. He grits his teeth, floodgates coming down on his deluge of vitriol.

“Of course not,” North says, her mouth curled in a tight smile. It’s not an unpleasant expression, but it certainly says: my mind has been made up.

Connor’s stomach plummets through the floor. He can feel the rats in the sewers gnawing on it. “Oh, don’t you dare…”

“Hank will be accompanying you,” she says, and Connor buries his face in his hands. He’s suddenly very tired of all of this, suspects and death threats and great big androids with features like carved marble. He needs to go home, pound three Ambien and take a six hour nap, not sit here listening to this. “We have arranged a backstory for you leaving the precinct - a family emergency in Canada - as well as false identities for the pair of you. It should hold water.”

“So, it’s decided?” Connor bites down on the words as if he’s about to cry. Which he absolutely fucking isn’t. “I don’t get any say in it.”

“Lieutenant Stern. You have seen a crime, you are a witness. You have received a death threat, you need protection. So,” she spreads her hands and Connor nods. It’s all very smart and he’s furious about it. “Witness protection.”

“Fine. Fine! I understand.” At the risk of looking like a petulant child, he gets calmly to his feet, smoothing the wrinkles from the front of his shirt. He’s not fine, but he knows that pushing the issue further is going to get him nowhere. 

“Good,” North regards him coolly. “I’ll send you the details.”

The temptation to flip the bird is almost too much to resist, but he swallows it, clasps his hands behind his back - and leaves. 

Hank and Connor are advised to travel to their new accommodation separately, and Connor has no real trouble in complying with those particular wishes. The idea of spending three hours in a tiny airplane seat, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Hank seated beside him, is not a desirable one. 

(Or perhaps it’s a touch too desirable. That’s not the sort of thing that he’s willing to examine right now.)

Their assigned location is not, as Connor had so eloquently predicted, _Bumfuck, Alaska_, but rather some sleepy beach community on the east coast of Florida. Waiting to board his flight from Detroit Metro Airport, Connor does his research, scrolling through various websites and clicking half-heartedly on all manner of retirement homes, yacht clubs and golf courses. The nearest bar not connected to some kind of sporting facility is over an hour’s drive away. 

He’s going to be bored out of his fucking mind. 

Instead of catching a later flight, Hank has opted to drive the seventeen hours to Florida. He had told Captain North his decision in his even, measured way, explaining simply that “it will be better this way”. Connor wonders if his choice has something to do with the recent discussions surrounding the rights of solo androids in air travel - some airlines refusing them downright, others insisting that they go into stasis or disconnect from the mainframe altogether. 

He imagines Hank allowing his LED to flicker yellow, yellow, yellow and then off, all the light gone from behind those blue eyes, as clear as a winter sky. He pushes the thought from his mind.

So rather than sitting alongside his burly android partner, he gets to sit with an old couple in matching pale linen suits, who offer him hard candies from a paper bag and ask him prying questions about his personal life. With a strained smile, he puts on his headphones and tells himself firmly that it’s definitely better without Hank. 

When he exits the arrivals building, the humid Florida heat hits him in a wet, cloying wave. As a kind of self-sabotaging protest against this whole thing, he has brought with him only a tiny suitcase, minimal clothes, surely nothing very practical. He hails a cab from the rank and climbs into the passenger seat. The driver gives him a confused look when he tells him the address. “You sure that’s right, man?” 

Connor shrugs. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“Alright, well. You gonna be-”

“Bored?” Connor settles back into the seat. “Don’t I know it.”

When they pull up outside the house, Connor regards it with a critical gaze. It’s just one floor, a low-slung bungalow, its yellow walls long faded pale by many years of exposure to the Floridian sun. The sash windows look grimy, the white paint chipping around the edges, and the roof is a uniform, slate grey, same as all the other houses in the vicinity. 

“Listen, man, if you need a ride into the city or whatever, take my card.” The taxi driver offers him a sleek black card with a number printed on it and the legend: Rick’s Cars. Connor doesn’t take it, but he gives him a fifty and doesn’t ask for change.

“Thanks anyway,” he says, with a weak grin.

He grabs his suitcase and the small bag of groceries that they had stopped to pick up - perhaps groceries is an overstatement, the bag contains bread, beer and instant coffee - from the trunk of the cab and lets himself in, slipping a key out of the envelope that Captain North had given him before he left.

Inside, the house is minimal: an open plan kitchen and living space, a television and a sofa of indeterminable colour, as well as a bookshelf with a haphazard collection of faded paperbacks stacked on it. Off the narrow corridor, there are two bedrooms, both with double beds, and a small, plain bathroom. A hallway closet with nothing in it, and hanging on the walls, two printed canvases showing exquisitely generic cityscapes. It’s clean enough, but it’s clear that no one has lived here properly for quite some time. 

Connor thinks of his apartment back in Detroit. Thinks of the photographs he has tacked to the walls, the Chinese takeout containers that litter the counters in the kitchen. The one window that lets in just a dribble of light from outside, none of this southern sunshine, golden hour bullshit. The elevator that never works. He misses it.

As he’s dumping his suitcase in the larger of the two bedrooms, Connor’s phone buzzes. Flashing on his screen is a message from Hank, which reads: “I am en route to the assigned address. I will be with you in 5h 23m.” 

Connor doesn’t reply. Instead, he wonders just how drunk he can get in that extremely precise frame of time.

By the time Hank arrives - just under five and a half hours later - Connor is laid out flat on the sofa, half asleep. After the second bottle of beer, his eyes had started to close, and before he had even had the energy to open the third, he was beginning to drift in and out of sleep. The television plays an old film on low volume, some cheap romantic comedy starring actors that Connor barely recognises.

It is not the rumble of the car in the driveway or the click of the front door opening that finally startles him from his doze, but rather the sound of Hank’s voice, clear and clipped over the murmuring from the television set. “Hello, Lieutenant.”

“Fuck-” Connor’s heart jumps a mile in his chest and he sits up suddenly, bolt upright. One of the empty bottles clatters to the floor. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“It wasn’t my intention.”

Hank is close, leaning over Connor like his prone body was some kind of crime scene to be inspected. He’s not wearing his usual smart attire of a dark jacket and matching slacks, but instead a pale patterned button down and light wash jeans, with his silver hair swept back, away from his face. And, dear God, is he wearing boat shoes? Connor looks down to see that Hank is, in fact, sporting a pair of tan boat shoes on his feet, no socks. And although he knows it’s not possible, Connor thinks that his face has already caught the sun somewhat, his cheekbones lightly freckled. He looks every inch the rich Floridian retiree. 

Connor often wonders what kind of cruel joke the universe has played on him, sending him an android partner built exactly like the kind of person he would want to bend him roughly over the nearest flat surface. Every single specification taken into account, no expense spared.

He flops back onto the sofa. It’s too late and his head hurts too much to think about this massive robot bear who he is certainly not attracted to.

“I’ll take you grocery shopping tomorrow,” Hank calls from the kitchen. Connor can hear cupboards opening and closing. 

“I went on the way here,” Connor comments, his eyes closed.

“You bought beer and coffee,” Hank says, his voice is closer now. Connor can’t see him, but he knows that he is standing above him, one pale eyebrow raised.

“And bread,” Connor adds, as if that’s going to change anything.

“As much nutrition as that will no doubt provide, please allow me to take you grocery shopping tomorrow. You know. For my benefit.”

God, they even installed a cutting sarcasm module alongside everything else. Connor murmurs some kind of reluctant assent, rolls over onto his side, and does his very best to fall asleep. Thankfully, Hank spares him any lectures about sleeping on a sofa being bad for your back.

The next few days pass uneventfully, which is exactly what Connor had been worried about. He’s been given a phone with a limited amount of data, but he’s not allowed access to any of his social media accounts and certainly not the DPD network, lest his android pursuer find him via his cyber footprint. He spends a lot of these first few days lying on the sofa, watching reruns of old sitcoms.

“So if I can’t contact Captain North,” Connor asks one evening, as they’re sitting out on the small patio at the back of the house, “how will she know where I am? How does she know I haven’t been killed already and you’re on your way to tell her?”

Connor takes a long drag on his cigarette and ignores the disapproving look that Hank gives him. He’s listened to enough of his lectures about the risks of early onset heart disease caused by smoking. Instead, he watches a couple of birds peck around on the yellowing lawn. 

“I’ve set up an encrypted connection to the DPD mainframe,” Hank explains. “As long as we stay together and you communicate your movements to me, I will be able to keep you safe.”

“So you’re like my bodyguard?” 

“That’s not my primary function but, yes. Essentially.” 

For a moment, Connor considers analysing precisely why the image of Hank as his bodyguard is so obscenely sexual. He decides against it.

“God. I’m just like Whitney Houston,” Connor mutters, exhaling a plume of smoke through his nostrils.

He’s not sure if Hank understands the reference. If he does, he doesn’t say anything. 

After a week of allowing Connor to wallow in his own self-imposed ritual of boredom, Hank takes it upon himself to try and introduce some kind of life into their daily routine. Perhaps it presents itself as a mission objective, beeping urgently on his internal display.

“You know that staying in the house and sulking isn’t going to change anything about this situation, don’t you, Lieutenant?” 

Hank asks him this one morning, when Connor is half-awake, barely out of bed, and still dressed in a ratty band t-shirt and a pair of boxers. He replies by taking a carton of orange juice out of the fridge - organic, not from concentrate, at Hank’s request - and taking a swig without using a glass.

Hank ignores his poor kitchen etiquette. “You shouldn’t be angry at Captain North.”

“But I am,” Connor answers. It’s a childish answer. He feels incredibly childish about this whole situation, honestly.

“She’s just trying to protect you.”

Connor knows, deep down, that that is what is at the crux of it. Captain North has his best interests at heart, and that she’s worked hard to stop him from getting hurt. It’s hard for him to accept. All his life he’s pushed hard to get to where he is, he’s worked himself to the bone and then some, he’s had to be fiercely, blazingly independent. Other people just let you down, he’s learned. They fuck you over. They leave. 

Tie all of that up with his feelings - feelings that shouldn’t be feelings - for Hank, and it’s just easier to be angry. It’s easier to be angry than to crack open the tough shell of his chest and examine all the reasons why he finds it so hard to accept the kindness of others. 

“We could do something today, if you liked.” Hank’s voice pulls him from his reverie.

Connor imagines another day lying on the sofa, watching shitty daytime TV and waiting religiously until the time that it’s acceptable to open his first drink. It’s not an appealing thought, but he’s too stubborn to entertain the possibility that Hank's suggestions might be appealing either.

Connor wonders what Hank would say if he went back to bed and pulled the covers over his head until his pursuer in Detroit was reprimanded. 

He sighs, knowing full well that that is not an option. “Okay, fine. What do you want to do?”

Hank’s LED spirals yellow, and Connor can tell that he’s doing rapid research somewhere behind those clear blue eyes.

“Well, the International Swimming Hall of Fame Museum is less than a kilometre from here.”

Connor pauses, halfway to taking a seat at the kitchen table. “Huh?”

Hank grins. “I’m joking, Lieutenant. I can do that, you know.”

“Oh!” Connor’s laugh is almost involuntary, a low, short sound that surprises both him and Hank. They both know that there hasn’t been much levity in this house recently. “Well, thank fuck.”

Hank reels off a long list of places that they could spend the day - more museums (Connor turns down this idea immediately), golf courses, shopping malls. Connor doesn’t think it’s a very good idea for someone to equip him with a golf club right now, and they haven’t been given a large enough allowance to make visiting a shopping mall worthwhile.

“We could just go to the beach,” Hank says. His voice is curt, like the final resort delivered to a grumpy toddler. 

Connor considers the suggestion. It doesn’t sound too bad, actually. The weather is beautiful, a white sun hanging in a slightly hazy sky, an almost breeze threatening in the warm air. Connor did pack his beach clothes, crumpled in the bottom of his bag as a kind of _in case you stop being a sulky asshole_ afterthought. He wonders if Hank will wear a swim trunks. He wonders what he looks like under his clothes. Oh, alright. 

“Yeah. Okay, fine,” Connor agrees. “We’ll go to the beach.”

The beach is a fifteen minute walk from the house, a glorious strip of golden sand, uninterrupted, save for a few white houses nestled where the land meets the coast. Never one for beach vacations when he was a kid - his mother was far more interested in cultural expeditions - there’s still a great deal of novelty in feeling the sand between his toes, hearing the pull of the waves as they break on the shore. 

The wind is higher here, whipping his hair up around his face. As reluctant as he is to admit it, it’s the lightest his chest has felt in a while. 

Hank, as it turns out, does wear swim trunks. And, much to Connor’s delight and dismay (in equal measure), the sight of him in them is ridiculously arresting. Broad shoulders and a thick chest, rough with silvery hair that stretches down across the swell of his belly. Connor can’t help but wonder if his belly is soft, with the give of a human’s, or whether it’s an unforgiving curve of plastic. Oh God, either way? He thinks he'd like to find out.

His trunks are dark navy with a narrow line of white piping, neat and conservative, but Connor’s mind takes him very quickly to places that are entirely inappropriate. Before he can stop himself, Connor has a piercingly realistic vision of what it might be like to sink his teeth into the flesh of Hank’s inner thigh. He gives himself a sharp pinch on the inside of his wrist.

As they stand together on the sand, discarded clothing and towels lain out at their feet, Connor feels like he’s not the only one doing his share of scrutiny. He practically hear Hank’s LED whirring.

“You okay?”

Hank nods. His expression is unreadable. 

When he speaks, there’s a hesitance in his voice that Connor is unaccustomed to. “I didn’t know you had tattoos, Lieutenant. Or any other body modifications.” 

Connor wasn’t expecting that, and he’s not sure how to reply. “Oh.” His tattoo, more than ten years old now, stretches across his chest, collarbone to collarbone. A circular cameo over the flat of his sternum, wrapped by a melee of bright flowers that are printed down towards his ribcage. Vines press their tendrils over the thick scars that run beneath his nipples, their lines slightly crooked, grown pale and silvery with age. And in a spur of the moment decision that he has since deemed one of his more successful last minute plans, a bar runs through his right nipple, a steel ball fixed at each end. 

With a concerted effort, Connor manages to pull his thoughts into order enough to formulate an answer. “You didn’t know? Don’t they show up on scans or something?”

Hank shakes his head. “I’m usually scanning your vitals, Lieutenant, not looking for the presence of metal in your body. You’ve never been hit by a bullet whilst I’ve been your partner. Thankfully.” 

He seems flustered, vocal modulation running a little slow, a little tentative. 

“What’s wrong? They rile up your android sensibilities?” Connor’s mouth quirks up into a grin. He’s teasing.

“Of course not,” Hank scoffs, pulling his gaze away from Connor and looking down towards the shoreline. A couple are walking a dog along the water’s edge, both of them leaving footprints in the wet sand. “Androids don’t adhere to the same social conventions as humans do. We find them rather primitive, actually.”

“Mhm.” Connor makes a noise of assent. “Can you go swimming?”

Hank’s LED flashes a brief yellow spiral at the sudden change of subject. “Yes.”

“Come on then.”

They spend the rest of the day at the beach, bathing in the water, which is almost body warm, and laying out on the sand. Even though he can’t get sunburnt, Hank opts to sit beneath an umbrella, resting back on his elbows, his legs folded at the ankle. Connor lies on his side and reads a dog-eared paperback that he found in the house, some detective story set in the deep south. A lot of the plot is wildly improbable, the characters cliched, but he finds himself enjoying it nonetheless.

Hank makes a good companion. He’s quiet, mostly, but he makes a few comments, thoughtful but superficial questions that Connor answers freely. He makes a joke about a group of surfers who appear in the mid-afternoon, hoping to find breakers in the remarkably calm sea. Connor tips his head back and laughs at that. 

In bed that night, his skin warm and smooth from the sand, Connor slides his hands between his legs and thinks about Hank. Hank’s legs in those shorts, the twist of muscle beneath his skin. His broad shoulders, the curve of his belly, seemingly soft and covered in silver hair. And those blue eyes of course - that steady, piercing gaze directed entirely towards him. Singular, dedicated.

He comes hard, biting a crescent moon into the soft of his own palm. He bites it around Hank’s name.

Weeks pass. The curls of Connor’s hair grow blonder in the sun, his skin freckles. Hank’s appearance doesn’t change. Hank shares irregular updates from the DPD as he receives them through his encrypted network: _still working on the case, some progress, no we can't go home yet_. Connor reads every single case of Detective Waylon Buckner, each one of them more unrealistic than the last. 

Connor was never built for inactivity. The beach is all well and good, but it's not long before their bubble of bright tranquility starts to feel oppressive, thin-walled but impossible to escape. Minutes have never passed quite so slowly. He misses his work, he misses the roar and rush of the city, the unpredictability and excitement of his life in Detroit. He’s not used to it being so quiet when he lays his head down to sleep. 

After a week, he can feel the tense wall of boredom growing dangerously behind his eyes. After two weeks, he thinks very seriously about hot-wiring Hank’s car and driving himself back to Michigan. 

Hank. Goddamn fucking Hank. He can’t stand being trailed by Hank every hour of the day, can’t stand how he has to let him know exactly where he’s headed and then check in with him every ten minutes if he goes out by himself. It becomes such a hassle that he just lets Hank follow him around everywhere like a huge, serious dog. 

More than that, he can’t stand the way his chest has started to leap whenever Hank looks at him, the way he comes so quickly when he touches himself and imagines Hank’s mouth pressed against the curve of his hip bone. 

Twenty days into their stay, he knows that something has to snap or he’s going to scream, throw some kind of desperate and ugly tantrum that will probably make Hank want to dump him into the sea. 

He knows that Hank has to enter a brief stasis period every night, and that he usually does it in the small hours when he can be certain that Connor is asleep. So on that twenty first day, exactly three weeks into the crushing boredom of the witness protection program, Connor sets an alarm on his phone for four am, puts it on vibrate and places it underneath his pillow. Just the knowledge that he’s planning something that is even remotely against the rules, remotely _dangerous_, gives him a little thrill in his chest.

The next morning, the alarm wakes him with a start, even the muffled sound seeming very loud in the silent house. He lies awake for a long moment, staring at the whitewashed boards of the ceiling, listening for Hank’s footsteps. He contemplates just rolling over and going back to sleep, but he knows that this might be his only real chance to grab a tiny, pitiful sliver of time for himself. Hank’s bedroom door is mercifully closed, and the rest of the house is dark and still. 

The empty streets are worth the early start. With each step, Connor can feel the tension in his body beginning to spool out, to unravel into looser and looser coils around his shoulders. It’s cool before sunrise, and he has to wrap his jacket tighter around him, walking quickly between the pools of yellow light cast by the street lamps. 

He heads for the sea. In the darkness, the water looks almost solid, an impenetrable black mass barely broken by the white crests of the waves. The sand is cool and slightly damp, and he sits, removing his shoes so he can press his toes into the grains. 

Perhaps he falls asleep there, with his head lolling back against the seawall, because before long, the sun is creeping over the horizon. It turns the dark sea red, then gold, then orange in a great thick stripe of light. It’s warm, suddenly, as the face of the sun emerges fully from the water, and he has to shuck off his jacket.

When his phone finally buzzes, he’s been gone from the house for nearly four hours. He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. It was only a matter of time, of course. Hank is looking for him. His chest clenches with the feeling that he’s done something very stupid, that the repercussions are going to far outweigh the pleasure of having a few hours to himself.

The tension thrums palpably between the walls of their little house. Hank is sitting on the sofa, hands on his knees, his back impossibly ramrod straight. His gaze snaps toward Connor the minute his key turns in the lock, and he can see that his LED is spiralling a consistent, sickly yellow.

“Where were you?” The question is instantaneous, Hank’s voice run under by a dangerous, icy calm. He doesn’t sound worried, he doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t sound anything, really.

“I went for a run.”

It’s a terrible excuse, and they both know it. Hank’s eyes narrow. “No you didn’t.”

“Okay, I didn’t.”

Hank gets to his feet, and Connor is struck for the hundredth time by just how big Hank is, what an imposing figure he cuts against the white walls.

“You left the house without telling me where you were going. I told you not to.” Still that searing calm in his voice. “Why did you do that?”

_Why did you do that?_ Connor turns the question over in his mind. It winds inside him like a reel of razor wire.

Why did he do that? Because he’s bored out of his mind here? Because he’s angry? Because he’s tired of being cooped up with this beautiful, intense man who he’s scared to examine the truth of his feelings for? God knows he’d fuck Hank in the blink of an eye, but maybe… He's started to think that maybe it’s more than that. There’s something hidden deep in his chest that shines bright and clear at the thought of Hank, that swells to an almost painful point when he looks into his eyes. The time spent by his side has started to chip away those walls he’s built high and thick around his heart and honestly? It terrifies him.

He has no answer to give. He steps towards Hank.

“What? Were you scared?” Connor’s voice is harsher than he means it to be. Hank’s LED flashes red. 

“You put yourself in danger, Lieutenant,” Hank’s voice is low, rough around the edges. “It was reckless.”

Connor feels frustration bubble in his throat. He’s sick of this. 

“Look,” Connor punctuates the word with a finger pressed against Hank’s chest. He has to do something with the waves of emotion roiling in his stomach, and they push out of him in a single, hard movement, vicious and aggressive. “No Detroit criminal is going to be looking for me in the streets of Florida at five o’ clock in the fucking morning.”

“You don’t know that. Captain North said-”

“Oh, _fuck_ what Captain North said!” 

Hank’s gaze is steady, so steady that it makes Connor want to cry - hot, angry tears, bitter and childish - just to pull some kind of reaction out of him.

“Captain North instructed me to protect you.”

“Oh, did she?” In the wake of Hank’s unwavering calm, Connor can hear his own voice beginning to spiral into something desperate, almost hysterical. “So that’s the only reason you’re here, is it?”

He doesn’t know what kind of answer he’s expecting, and from the puzzled look that briefly crosses Hank’s face, he doesn’t know what kind of reply to give either. 

“Protecting you is part of my mission.” 

“Your mission?” Connor spits the words back at him. “Jesus Christ, you really are a machine.”

He hears the words leave his mouth. He hears the way that they fall between them like lead weights, heavy and poisonous. They're nasty, blackened by Connor's internal struggles, struggles that really have nothing to do with Hank. He doesn't deserve to be pushed in the way of them.

Hank’s LED goes red and stays that way for longer than Connor has ever seen it. A burning ring of light, pulsing like a heartbeat. 

Connor’s stomach drops suddenly. “Hank. I didn’t mean that.”

“Didn’t you?” There’s a sharp edge to Hank’s voice now, a rawness that makes Connor’s chest ache with guilt. He looks so sad, all of a sudden, those blue eyes staring at a point somewhere above Connor’s head.

Connor wants to explain everything. He wishes he could find the words for how he feels about all of this, for how he feels about _Hank_, but the words don’t come. They burn in his chest and stick like molasses behind his teeth. 

“Hank, I’m sorry.” It’s tiny and pitiful beside everything that he wants to say.

Hank doesn’t reply. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t move. He just stands, acting the part of the empty machine shell that Connor knows, in his heart, is so much more than the truth of him.

Connor knows has to do something. He can hear his own heart hammering in his ears. 

He leans forward, a desperate, last-ditch step, and kisses Hank on the mouth, hard and chaste. There’s a rushing in his head like the sound of the sea.

For a split second, he thinks that Hank is going to push him away. He prepares himself for the reality of that, Hank's hands balled into fists against his chest. But he doesn’t. He kisses him back. He kisses him back and the scratch of his beard is rough against Connor’s chin, his cheeks. His hands find Connor’s waist, then splay wide across the small of his back in a way that is almost eager. Hank pulls him closer, deepening their kiss, and Connor’s whole world turns on its axis.

They wrap themselves into each other, the kiss lasting for what seems like hours, although it cannot be longer than a couple of beautiful, aching seconds. Hank’s tongue presses into his mouth, warm, insistent. Too much. Entirely too much. Connor takes a pace back, stumbles, wrenching himself out of Hank’s grip. He wants this more acutely than he thinks he’s ever wanted anything in his life. He can’t do it.

“Fuck.” The word from Connor's mouth is a heavy, shaking exhale.

“Connor.”

The sound of his own name in Hank’s voice is too much to bear. He feels vulnerable beneath his gaze, stripped out and exposed, as if he’s been gutted by the press of Hank’s hands.

“Sorry,” Connor mutters.

And he’s gone, back out into the streets, the front door clicking shut behind him. He wonders if Hank is following him. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know if he wants him to or not. He doesn’t stop until he reaches the sea.

The beach isn’t empty anymore, the sun hangs low and heavy in a clear sky, drawing people out of their homes towards the lure of the water. Connor barely registers the other presences alongside his own. He thinks instead about the demanding press of Hank’s mouth, the warmth of his hands rucked up beneath his shirt.

Did he make a mistake, kissing Hank like that? Or was his real mistake turning and running, the same fucking thing he’s done time and time and time before?

Connor looks out at the lapping waves and wonders if it's too melodramatic to wish that a freak tsunami would just rear its ugly head and suck him bodily beneath the surface.

Perhaps it is a little melodramatic. He shakes his head, _stupid_, and turns back in the direction the house.

**Author's Note:**

> come and say hi on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/andpersephone)


End file.
